At home with our colonial work: ABC TV's New Look at New Guinea

Abstract

In 1958–1959 the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit made a series of documentaries on Papua and New Guinea for ABC Television, for the most part compiled from re-purposed material shot for documentaries that the Unit was producing for the Department of Territories at the time. This article examines ‘transcoding’ and domestic address in the New Look at New Guinea documentary series. It focuses on the modes of civic address deployed in early public service television documentary in the context of civic education about Australia's colonial development of peoples in Papua and New Guinea.

Notes

1. The exact dates of production, and dates of transmission in capital cities, are difficult to determine. The Screen Australia (previously the CFU, then Film Australia) database lists all productions as 1958/1959. Producer Ron Maslyn Williams was involved in shooting footage for the ABC along with other projects which share footage and mirror themes in that period, as noted. However, a six-part series for the ABC is still being mentioned as ‘in process’ in February 1962 (National Archives of Australia, hereafter NAA, [A452] A452/1), so it seems likely that this was an occasional series, spanning a period of some years. ABC archives have no further information.

2. Williams was a committed Catholic and he focused his attention, when possible, on the role of the missions in the territories. This is a term he uses in his early field notes on his research trips (Williams 1955)

3. The CFU, and Williams himself, had considerable experience with distributing both programming and footage to US and UK television (Landman 2010).

4. In The Queen in Australia (1954) a radio transmission of a royal speech sets the scene for a montage of shots uniting disparate national sites into an exemplary ‘imagined community’ of national citizenry, making and marking nationhood through this shared historical moment (Anderson 1991).

5. The credits acknowledge the Department of Territories. This is not my focus, but a case could be made that a more diverse collection of experts are consulted – less focus on administration staff for example, and that, concomitantly, a greater diversity of opinion is hinted at in the ABC series.

6. Inglis is a little more equivocal in his account, saying of the two services: ‘There were different views with the Territory and in Australia about which was the better model for the coming nation’ (1983, 235).

7. At a practical level, there were also ongoing difficulties with recruiting and retaining suitably trained staff, and with work conditions within an isolated, under-resourced and apparently demoralized public service. The review exempts only the radio broadcast service from its view that the DIES ‘is the equivalent of run-down family business’ (NAA A452, 1868/5907).

8. For example, Department of Territories Secretary C.R. Lambert to the Secretary, Department of the Interior (7 May 1952, in NAA A518/1, O141/3/1), calls for propaganda films for exhibition to the Trusteeship Council, on the advice of the Special Representative, as well as ‘publicity’ (for investors and settlers) and ‘educational and recruiting’ films, for Australian domestic use.